


All In

by coldhope



Category: Cars (Movies), Planes (Movies)
Genre: Introspection, Post-Movie, and dusty shows off, blade remembers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-09 00:50:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4327557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's always different <i>looking into</i> something than <i>being inside</i> it.</p><p>Always. No matter where you are, who you are. Intensity is relative. Blade can remember, in the dim dead days of Los Angeles, people talking in bars: <i>oh you're on TV, you're him, you're</i> Blade Ranger, <i>oh wow you're really him, what's it like, what's it like being awesome, what's it like being a star? What's it like being you?</i></p><p>~</p><p>After the fire: Blade watches the kid flying aerobatics and considers what it was like to have somebody else fly your stunts for you. Remembers another world. Remembers what it was like to be right out of make-believe and trying hard as he could to be <i>real</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All In

It's always different _looking into_ something than _being inside_ it.

Always. No matter where you are, who you are. Intensity is relative. Blade can remember, in the dim dead days of Los Angeles, people talking in bars: _oh you're on TV, you're him, you're_ Blade Ranger, _oh wow you're really him, what's it like, what's it like being awesome, what's it like being a star? What's it like being you?_

And at the time of course it had been great, it had been everything, it had been the ability to sleep at night without ever even knowing that there were things which ate sleep; it had been never being really afraid of anything because you knew, you _knew_ you'd live forever. You worked in a subtly different world, where rules weren't real, where everything stopped being dangerous when they yelled CUT, where life and death were just ideas, abstract concepts harnessed to do work and let go once the episode wrapped.

He knows because someone somewhere along the lines has told him that stopping even a very tiny thing releases energy--calculable, quantifiable--and that sometimes the energy thus released can be intense enough to burn. Changing the course of a lifetime all in one go--that hurts. He knows that. 

He knows a lot of things, but none of them have prepared him for being _inside_ a fire. He knows fire, he knows it very well, knows its little ways, its vagaries, its behavior--but he has known it from above in the clear air where the immediate danger to him is what the fire does to that air. Not from inside the fire itself.

They had lost time they hadn't had to lose, talking about the kid's problems. Blade had _known_ they didn't have the time even as he stared into the kid's face, his rotors slowing to a stop, hearing what Dusty had to say. They hadn't had time but he had listened anyway because this was not a thing you couldn't hear. 

_Imagine the lives you won't save tomorrow._

And then the close darkness of the abandoned mine drift and the awareness of the kid behind him, hopefully far enough in, hopefully being smart and taking small breaths and hunkering down as far as possible on his pontoons--and then the fire.

Blade had known _about_ fire. Now he _knows_ fire. 

The light, first the light and a fraction of a second later the heat like a physical thing pushing him back--and he knows from somewhere it _is_ a physical thing, air expanding--the heat blinding him, choking, boiling the paint all along his exposed port side, searing it into bubbles, reaching past the paint and the plating to his cables and hydraulics inside. The pain had been huge, sudden, like a physical blow, a wave--but after the first shocking impact had come the individual awareness of his lines and conduits first clotting and then flaring, things popping and hissing and then silent in the steady rushing endless flow of heat. At some point he'd lost consciousness, because the next thing he's aware of is the clatter and tick of his own cooling metal, and a lack of light. 

Sick drilling agony from the burns all along his port side as he makes himself slam over and over again against the timbers blocking the drift-mouth. Timbers that had surely saved both their lives--he listens, hears the kid coughing, hopes he isn't badly hurt. Again and again he bashes against the still-smoldering wreckage, and light floods past him, daylight, light he hadn't been entirely sure that he would see again. 

Blade has spent decades killing fires, and has never known until now what it is like to be inside one. What it is actually like, and what it is, what it actually is that he's...saved people from. All this time. 

Everything hurts. He's frankly amazed he hadn't snapped a rotor blade smashing their way out of the old drift-mine. That doesn't seem to matter. Everything is quiet now, with that particular thick silence of ash drifting down. Of bright hungry death having passed over, having passed by, leaving soft quiet behind. Soft grey quiet, choking, bitter with ash. 

The pain doesn't seem to matter. The world has clarified, shrunk down, become very simple, as if he is looking through a single shaft of ice. _Get back to base_. That's what he has to do, and he thinks he can still do that, thinks his engines will respond, and that's all that matters: _get back to base_. He tells the kid to follow him to the meadow. _We'll take off from there._

The kid takes off--doesn't sound great, Blade thinks the water ingestion and then the ash hasn't done him any favors, on top of that gearbox, but that's not the point, that's not the point, no, focus, _focus_ , and he pushes away everything but _up_.

Up. His engines aren't working right, he can feel it, but he thinks they better damn well deal, leaning on his collective. Up. _Up_ and finally he's spinning fast enough that he can feel the lightness come over him, feel his wrecked landing gear lose the ground and _up, come on, up, you can do this, you have to do this_ and it's okay but no no no it's _not_ okay his tail rotor's slow slow it's too slow and he's spinning, he's spinning and everything hurts so badly that for the moment of clear awareness he has before the ground Blade thinks _good, oh good, it'll be over soon, it'll stop hurting, I'm sorry I didn't do better, I'm sorry, at least I did_ something, _Nick, I tried_ and then nothing.

~

Later, much later, he sits with Maru at the edge of their cliff, watching the kid do stupid aerobatic maneuvers in their clear air. Watching him learning how his new form really works, what it gives and what it takes. Mostly just watching him have a good time on the Park Service's dime, which, yeah, he's gonna have to tell Dusty to bring it in and quit wasting fuel already. But it's good, right now. Good to watch the kid do shit he couldn't, shouldn't have been able to. 

"I told Patch he's got ten minutes," Maru says, looking over as Blade rolls up beside him. "After that he's back here, and doing extra chores for misappropriation of resources."

"Good," Blade says, and settles a little on his gear to observe. He and Maru both watch as the kid pulls a split-S that makes both of them first wince and then grin. 

"He didn't have to come back here," Maru says. "He's got another big old race in a couple of months. Didn't have to come volunteer for us, did it anyway."

"I think he did." Blade turns away, feeling the edges of a smile tug at his mouth. "Anyhow, who says what he's doing right now ain't training? Let me know if he breaks anything. Other than that, I got more important things to do."

"You think he's gonna stick the fire season here, after that race?"

"Yeah," says Blade. "He knows fire, now. I don't see that kid _not_ wanting to fight it. But, y'know. Don't make it too easy on him."

"Maru copies." There's a nasty gap-toothed grin on his mechanic's face that makes Blade work real hard to squash an answering smile. "You should go watch him, Blade. Hold up score cards."

"I'm tempted," he says. "Five point four for lousy form, lemme think. Runway FOD duty for three days."

"Pff, FOD only takes like half an hour here. Make it five."

Blade smiles--feeling it, the unfamiliar tug at one corner of his mouth--and spins up his engines, feeling them take and hold his weight, feeling the ground fall away from him again, feeling how _good_ it is just to fly. Which is due in no small part to the guy beside him.

"Ranger copies," he says, deadpan; and on Maru's laughter he lets himself rise. He already knows how to fight fire--but good firefighters never quit learning. And he knows, now, what fire is like from the _inside_. He hovers, that half-smile still quirking one corner of his mouth, and watches the kid fling himself through their sky: sharp, controlled, following his own directions. 

"Crophopper."

"Yeah, Blade?" The kid--red and white and black now, his own colors--casually pulls the kind of controlled tight sharp bank Blade knows a ton of planes would kill to manage. "You need the airspace? I'm almost done, I can get out of your way."

"Negative," he says. "Finish your workout. But you should know your crew chief is more than welcome up here at the base."

Dusty throws himself into a tight aileron roll, the kind that makes Blade slightly dizzy even to witness, and roars over the base airstrip into what looks like half a Cuban Eight. 

"Like I said," Blade says, turning to watch, aware of the Gs the kid just pulled, aware of how hard that actually is, "if that old Corsair who got you going on your world tour ever wants to drop in, he's welcome. Cabbie'd love to have a chance to swap war stories."

The kid abruptly loses concentration and Blade sighs as he catches it again, skids round in an awkward ungraceful but utterly enthusiastic swerve. "Really? You mean it?"

"Don't kill yourself," Blade says, drily, hovering. "Bad press. Also, yeah, I mean it. Might be smart if you stop asking me that kind of question." 

Dusty comes in to land, awkward, distracted, and bounces to a stop as Blade slides easily overhead. "What kind of question?"

"Chrysler," Blade says, and touches down, his engines slowing through a hissing whine. "The kind where I say something and you ask me if I mean it. Now go report to Maru for chores, champ. You might be able to fly aerobatic rings around most people but you got some serious problems with _listening_ to what you are _told_. Do not make me repeat myself."

"...Got it. But you mean it about Skipper?"

"What did I _just say_ ," Blade growls, and spins up his engines again: lifting off and leaving the kid _but but but_ -ing on the tarmac feels good. Feels good all through him, his new conduits and wires and actuators tight but right. He lets himself rise, rise, the whole valley falling away beneath him the way the metal-and-glass canyons of LA had fallen, a lifetime ago. More than a lifetime. It's quiet. It's calm, for now.

Blade nudges his cyclic and leans into the air, heading for the obstacle-course of Augerin Canyon. They're working hard to rebuild the bridge. He wants to keep an eye on that. 

Oh but it makes a difference, thinking about fire from the inside as well as the out. It makes a difference. But all it really does, he thinks, nodding sternly to the construction crew as he circles past them, all it really does is intensify. He knows what it's like to be _in_ as well as out. 

And he is _all_ in.


End file.
